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Negatives

Originally Posted by woodmancy

You are taking an image of the original negative?

Do you have a setup for doing this.

If I might jump in ...

I've been doing this for a good while now - posted on the subject back in the day. I was using a 55 Micro Nikkor on the G1 to reproduce slides stuck on a window with a sheet of photo printing paper as a light source. Then I bought a Nikon bellows and slide copying unit on fleabay for a few pounds and now use the D700 and naturally have extended to my negatives. I've been through all the scanner vs. digicam argument on the wild web and personally I think this is the better of the two (mostly because I can't stretch to the enormous costs of wet scans anyway) and a full-frame RAW 16-bit reproduction is fine for me.

Re: Negatives

Originally Posted by m3photo

If I might jump in ...

I've been doing this for a good while now - posted on the subject back in the day. I was using a 55 Micro Nikkor on the G1 to reproduce slides stuck on a window with a sheet of photo printing paper as a light source. Then I bought a Nikon bellows and slide copying unit on fleabay for a few pounds and now use the D700 and naturally have extended to my negatives. I've been through all the scanner vs. digicam argument on the wild web and personally I think this is the better of the two (mostly because I can't stretch to the enormous costs of wet scans anyway) and a full-frame RAW 16-bit reproduction is fine for me.

Yes, but you are so lost in your blends and bokeh stuff you forgot to show us your set up, when I asked you last year . . . . .

Re: ... Walking the Seine ...

Do you have a setup for doing this. I love the idea of bring back these photos of the past (maybe this wasn't from the past)

Lovely picture ...

Thank you. This particular negative was made in 1998.

negative capture:

I use the L1 fitted with Olympus ZD 35mm f/3.5 Macro and EC14 teleconverter on a copystand, leveled and squared to a light box. This achieves a 1.4:1 magnification capture of the original Minox negative with a bit of the rebate showing, approximately a 5.5Mpixel image. The amount of rebate is sufficient to do the required lens correction as well (this lens and teleconverter produces a bit of simple barrel distortion, easily corrected in Photoshop).

It's the highest resolution mechanism I can achieve with current equipment for Minox negatives. My Nikon LS40 film scanner would only capture a 913x1256 pixel image (1.1 Mpixels) by comparison from this size original.

I use a similar setup for 35mm and medium format negatives occasionally, mostly because it is much quicker than scanning and renders a satisfactory amount of data to work with. But overall, best quality from a 35mm and up sized negative is achieved with a film scanner ... the same Nikon film scanner will return 2740x4110 pixels from a 35mm negative (11.3 Mpixels), and do it with more acutance than optical means with a camera. The major benefit of the film scanner is that it eliminates potential chromatic aberration and rectilinear distortion issues of optical capture with a camera lens, and of course film scanners are equipped with lenses designed and optimized for the flat-field task and generally hold the negative flatter than you can do without a cover glass in a camera capture.

rendering:

Assuming a camera capture (Vuescan does the tonal inversion for me when I'm capturing negatives with scanners):

Aside from rectilinear correction, I do this entirely in Lightroom. I have two tools at my disposal: a custom created Tone Curve preset which inverts the tonal values and a custom camera calibration profile which inverts the tonal values. I use one or the other depending on what I need to do ... the camera calibration profile I created generally works best with negatives that have a lot of contrast, the tone curve preset works best with negatives that have relatively low contrast.

Some of the other adjustment controls invert in their operations once either this camera calibration profile or tone curve preset are applied. So the process for doing the work is:

- import image with preset of tone curve or calibration profile applied
- do whatever spotting and tonal adjustment is required
- edit in Photoshop to clean up rectilinear correction (creates a TIFF master positive)
- do any final adjustments in Lightroom on the TIFF positive

Although it sounds complex, it works beautifully and conveniently. The custom Tone Curve preset was made by editing an exported TC preset with a plain text editor. The custom camera calibration profile was made using the DNG Profile Editor and a test raw capture of a representative negative from each of my cameras.

-

As I said, I primarily use camera capture with Minox negatives to improve resolution and with 35mm/medium format negatives to save time. But I also use it with 35mm/MF originals when they're badly curled or damaged and I feel that running them through the scanner will cause problems. For instance, this photo of my mother (made in 1952 by my father when they were on their honeymoon) was captured with the Panasonic G1 fitted with Macro-Elmarit 45mm f/2.8 ASPH because it was so badly curled the scanner could not hold it properly without damage. I flattened it with a heavy cover glass on the light box after scrupulously cleaning all surfaces ...

It's made a set of beautiful presentation prints at 11x17 inches for all my siblings. :-)

Re: ... Walking the Seine ...

Originally Posted by Godfrey

Thank you. This particular negative was made in 1998.

negative capture:

I use the L1 fitted with Olympus ZD 35mm f/3.5 Macro and EC14 teleconverter on a copystand, leveled and squared to a light box. This achieves a 1.4:1 magnification capture of the original Minox negative with a bit of the rebate showing, approximately a 5.5Mpixel image. The amount of rebate is sufficient to do the required lens correction as well (this lens and teleconverter produces a bit of simple barrel distortion, easily corrected in Photoshop).

It's made a set of beautiful presentation prints at 11x17 inches for all my siblings. :-)

Godfrey

Thanks for taking time out to do this - it helps me enormously. I'm going to try it with my Nikkor 55mm/3.5 Macro with 1:1 adapter. I am just doing 35mm stuff.

Re: Set up

Yes, but you are so lost in your blends and bokeh stuff you forgot to show us your set up, when I asked you last year . . . . .

Keith

PS - notice that I have given you 2 "beat the dead horses"

Quite right Keith, sorry about that.
Just seen this one too 'cos internet connections ain't all they're cracked up to be 'round these parts.
OK, so I soon "upgraded" set-ups for this kind of work and therefore never got around to taking a shot of the thing on the tripod. I'm sure you can imagine more or less how it went. Now, with the bellows on the camera and the slide/negative holder on the end no tripod is necessary; just point at the sky (shooting RAW poses no colour balance hiccups) and low(ish) speeds are no problem either as the whole thing moves with you.